The Chicago International Film Festival, which returns this weekend, debuted 60 years ago under the direction of 22-year-old independent filmmaker Michael Kutza with financial and in-kind support from Colleen Moore.

At the time, Moore may have appeared to some as just another name in the Tribune’s society pages. She was feted for her philanthropy, provided dispatches from her travels to France, Italy and Russia, and even won $25 in 1957 for writing about her fondest memory of Christmas. She visited Sophia Loren’s Roman villa and the Sacramento estate of then-California Gov. Ronald and Nancy Reagan.

A Chicago resident from the late 1930s until the 1970s, Moore had already lived a full life before she married local stockbroker Homer Hargrave and became adoptive mother to his children, Homer Jr. and Judy.

Moore starred in silent films during the early 20th century and successfully made the jump to “talkies,” or movies with sound. She has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, and her hand- and footprints are preserved in concrete outside Grauman’s Chinese Theatre in Los Angeles. The fun-loving actress — who was once described by Playboy as “about as sexy as a Shirley Temple doll” — had a keen fashion sense and a passion for creating outrageous dollhouses.

Here’s a look back at Moore’s career and life, with excerpts from her 1968 biography, “Silent Star,” and the Tribune’s archives.

1917

Born Kathleen Morrison near the U.S.-Canadian border in Port Huron, Michigan, Moore spent her formative years in Atlanta and Tampa Bay, Florida. Her dream of becoming an actress was achieved with help from her Chicago-based uncle Walter C. Howey. He had been an editor at the Chicago Inter Ocean, the Tribune and William Randolph Hearst’s Chicago Herald and Examiner and also was the inspiration for Walter Burns in Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur’s play “The Front Page.”

Howey helped usher D.W. Griffith’s controversial films “The Birth of a Nation” and “Intolerance” past Chicago censors. (Yes, there was a time — not so long ago — when the police decided what movies Chicagoans watched.) In return, Griffith agreed to cast Moore in one of his films.

“I was being sent to Hollywood — not because anybody out there thought I was any good, but simply to pay off a favor,” Moore wrote in “Silent Star.” “I stayed deflated for maybe a minute. How did I care how I got there? What mattered was I was finally going.”

But before Moore left for California with her grandmother as her chaperone, her uncle provided one more suggestion for the actress — a name change. After taking still photos and providing a screen test at Chicago’s Essanay Studios, he took her family out to dinner at College Inn inside the Sherman House Hotel at Clark and Randolph streets.

“Here’s to Colleen Moore, the newest Griffith discovery and a future movie star,” Howey said.

“My own name, he explained, was too long to fit on a movie marquee. Twelve letters was the limit,” she recalled. “It felt peculiar getting an entirely new name at the age of 15, but then everything I was doing now was new. Besides, hadn’t Mary Pickford been born Gladys Smith? I began to feel quite professional.”

The next day, Moore boarded the Santa Fe Chief for Hollywood.

Early Hollywood years

The auburn-haired actress with one blue eye and one brown arrived in Hollywood two days after Thanksgiving. She made three movies that year — “The Bad Boy,” “An Old-Fashioned Young Man” and “Hands Up!” Always in the background or in a supporting role in her early career, including appearances opposite Western star Tom Mix in “The Wilderness Trail” (1919) and John Barrymore in “The Lotus Eater” (1921), Moore yearned for a starring role.

Desperate to succeed, Moore altered her appearance in hopes of being cast in the flapper movie “Flaming Youth” (1923). Moore’s mother grabbed a pair of scissors “… and, whack, off came the long curls. I felt as if I’d been emancipated,” she wrote. “Then she trimmed my hair around with bangs like a Japanese girl’s haircut — or, as most people called it, a Dutch bob. It was becoming. More important, it worked.”

The film was a hit and Moore became the girl-next-door every young woman wanted to look like.

“No longer did a girl have to be beautiful to be sought after,” she wrote. “Any plain Jane could become a flapper.”

Aug. 18, 1923

“He’d been in love with me before he met me!” Moore wrote about her Aug. 18, 1921, introduction to 27-year-old John McCormick, a press agent for First National Studios. McCormick, who handled publicity for “The Lotus Eater,” asked Moore, then 19, just hours later to marry him.

They were officially engaged a year later and married exactly two years after their first meeting. Though McCormick negotiated better contracts for Moore, he also was an alcoholic who disappeared for days at a time — including on their wedding night.

Moore filed for divorce in April 1930, citing “mental cruelty.” It was finalized that May.

“John didn’t love me, Kathleen Morrison McCormick,” she wrote. “He was in love with his dream girl, Colleen Moore.”

Moore’s close friend Adela Rogers St. Johns drew on actual events from the marriage for her original story “A Star Is Born.”

1928

Shortly before her divorce, Moore and her parents decided to design and commission a fantastical dollhouse that would include 1,500 custom miniature items created by more than 100 artisans specifically for its rooms. The end result: a 9-square-foot castle with a 12-foot-tall tower that had running water, electric lighting and bejeweled walls and floors at a cost of nearly $500,000. Missing, however, were dolls.

“With an empty castle and full imagination, it’s easy to people the rooms with running, laughing elves and fairies,” Moore wrote.

Moore’s Fairy Castle toured the United States during the Great Depression as a way to raise money for charity before it arrived at the Museum of Science and Industry in 1949, where it remains today.

May 1937

Moore retired from acting and became a Chicagoan after she married Hargrave, her fourth husband. He was a widower who had been the first chairman of the Midwest Stock Exchange and former vice president of Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner and Smith.

She learned how to manage her finances and wrote a book titled “How Women Can Make Money in the Stock Market.”

Nov. 4, 1965

The first Chicago International Film Festival opened, and Moore enlisted a board of female directors to keep it going. She presented producer King Vidor with the festival’s D.W. Griffith Memorial Award.

She died in California in 1988.